Clean air ad featuring asthmatic kids is dangerously adorable

The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) did a really good job at tugging every heartstring available in this new ad:

Seriously, how much do you want to cry now? Maybe they really should send asthmatic kids into Congress as lobbyists.

NRDC and Sierra Club are doing the closest thing possible without running afoul of child labor laws — they’re running the ad in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and D.C. So when a legislator comes home from a hard day on the Hill and settles in to watch Two and Half Men — bam! — now he’s crying because he didn’t go into politics to give kids asthma.

The ad’s actually pegged to a forthcoming EPA decision on regulating carbon pollution in new power plants. The logic is that there’s a “growing body of scientific evidence that warming temperatures caused by industrial carbon pollution worsen smog pollution, which in turn causes asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses.” Following that train of thought requires making a couple of connections, so we can’t really blame these guys for boiling it down to: “You’re hurting really, really cute children. Stop it!”